More On The Front-end Focus

DJ Larson, Lehan Drugs

“We’ve held Twitter parties for new moms, where they could ask any question. We have our staff members answer the questions. The first time we did it, we had 700,000 people participate. This year it was close to one million. It was actually the same night as a presidential debate, and we were trending nationally on Twitter with our hashtag that night, which was pretty cool.”

“We do product giveaways during the Twitter parties, and this is a good time to ask your vendors to chip in with products. This is an example of the power of understanding your patients, understanding who they are, how they react to things, and where they have their conversations. Our new and expecting moms are on Twitter talking about hashtags, so that’s where we went to engage with them. We wouldn’t use Twitter to talk with our 65-year-old patients about DME. You have to be really nimble enough to understand that, hey you need to be over here marketing this way, but you’ve got to completely change your game over here when you market something else.”

DJ Larson, Lehan Drugs

“Some of the biggest success we’ve seen has come from: 1. Having the right people in place, and almost over staffing some of your floors so that when somebody comes in to look for a product, that person can get up from what they’re doing and go help that patient out on the floor. We want our staff to go to the customer rather than the customer having to come to us to ask for what they need.

Training those people to make sure that they know what they’re doing and know what they’re talking about. We continue to send them to additional education opportunities from either a product standpoint, technology standpoint. Making sure they completely understand what our technology can do.”

Zach Schultz, CarePro Pharmacies

“We use of the Good Neighbor Pharmacy business coaching program for help with analytics. We have a great business coach, Paul Satterfield, who has really helped us with the our analytics. We meet with him quarterly. He has access to some sophisticated tools that get some great data from our systems. Then we are able to use these insights monthly.”

“As we are looking at the data, we can make changes, and people are noticing. Our goal is to measure the financial impact of these changes over 60 or 90 days. We’re taking a continuous improvement mindset. We want to know how do we help our patients even a little bit more than we already do we continue to build on our relationships with them.” “Another thing we’re excited about is the ability Good Neighbor Pharmacy offers us to benchmark our data against other retailers in the market. We can see what categories they are selling, what’s trending, and how are we doing in comparison with them.”

Mike LaCombe, Majoria Drugs

“ECRS has a consulting service. We worked with them this summer to evaluate our database and help us implement a plan for automating our retail activities. We got with our team and our staff and they helped us develop the plan, which is fantastic, to really use these powerful tools in Catapult.”

Mike LaCombe, Majoria Drugs

“Next on our agenda for our ECRS POS is a loyalty program. ECRS Loyalty Bot does all kinds of data analysis. We’re going to be able to push emails and Facebook to customers based on very granular data that will also leverage what we’re already gathering in our market basket analyses. We’ll be able to import our pharmacy data into Loyalty Bot as well. That connection between our patient data and our sales and product rankings will allow us to better understand our customers. We’ll have insight into who our VIP customers are, and we’ll be able to create offers that really appeal to them, for example promotions for their preferred vitamins. That’s all there in Loyalty Bot right now and we know we need to be there.”